Jameson Lopp, a Bitcoin enthusiast, and a successful entrepreneur, gave his views on the discussion underway between Vitalik Buterin and Vlad Zamfir about the implementation of the Casper model of Proof-of-Stake [PoS] on the Ethereum blockchain. He addressed the state of Ethereum and whether or not developers would do a good job transitioning to PoS.

Ethereum and most cryptocurrencies are usually constructed on top of the Proof-of-Work [PoW] concept to validate and add blocks to the blockchain. The major drawback when it comes to PoW is that it requires a lot of resources. Apart from that, it can be also corrupted by the malicious 51% attack.

Proof-of-Stake, on the other hand, replaces miners with validators who stake some of their coins to validate upcoming blocks to the blockchain. The major advantage of PoS when compared to PoW is that it scraps the idea of spending resources like electricity.

There are discussions between two proposed PoS that the Ethererum blockchain will transition into. The two PoS models are Casper, the Friendly Finality Gadget (FFG), and Casper, the Friendly GHOST: Correct-by-Construction (CBC). Casper is not a specific project, but an amalgamation of two research projects which were being discussed by the Ethereum developers.

Referring to it, Jameson Lopp said that it was hard to believe that they have found an optimal version of whatever the protocol must be because it’s always changing and evolving since the work that is being done is always reiterated and changed accordingly.

He added:

“There was a consensus failure of their testnet, and that, in and of itself, doesn’t mean that the whole thing is flawed. It just means that there are still some bugs that need to be worked out.”

Lopp added that building such types of networks take a lot of time and one can ever really be 100 percent sure that it’s bug-free or perfectly operational. He stated:

“Well, the system has been running for this long and it’s securing this many millions or billion dollars in assets, and it has not been successfully attacked.”

He confirmed that there were a lot of people who were holding their Ethers to stake it when the PoS is actually implemented. Lopp believes that people want to be validators on the blockchain and earn interest on the tokens.